Black Duck Buys Ohloh from Geeknet

Black Duck Software,
a provider of products and services for managing the development and
use of open-source software, has announced its acquisition of Ohloh.net from Geeknet.

The transaction, which closed on Sept. 30, is viewed as a boost for
open-source software developers, as both companies focus on supporting
the developer community. In essence, Black Duck says it will integrate
Ohloh's open-source software directory with Black Duck's Koders.com site to promote expanded open-source adoption. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Ohloh was founded in 2006 and is among the largest free public
directories of open-source software. It also hosts a vibrant Web
community of software developers and FOSS (Free and Open Source) users.
Ohloh's directory contains information aggregated from more than
250,000 public code repositories, projects and forums. Black Duck,
which has acquired all assets of the Ohloh property, will maintain and
enhance the Ohloh Website, brand and project information for the Ohloh
community, and will ultimately combine Ohloh and Koders.com to
establish a comprehensive, free resource for developers to find,
create, use and manage FOSS.

"With this acquisition, Black Duck is directly benefitting the FOSS
community, by aiding developers' ability to find and use open source,"
said Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat,
said in a statement. "It's a strategic acquisition that will continue
Black Duck's transformation into a leading open-source enabler,
community member and FOSS champion."

Indeed, Black Duck officials said the company plans to use this
acquisition to help enhance and expand FOSS adoption by making it
easier for developers to tap the huge body of high-quality code in
open-source projects, and collaborate with their peers through the
Ohloh community. By working with the FOSS community, including forges,
foundations and other code repositories as well as individual projects
and developers, Black Duck will expand and enrich Ohloh with improved
data and new productivity tools. Black Duck will integrate Ohloh assets
with Black Duck's free code search site Koders.com, and will infuse it
with a complete set of FOSS project data from Black Duck's
comprehensive KnowledgeBase, to create a single premier Web destination
that developers can turn to as a trusted source of FOSS knowledge.

Black Duck's KnowledgeBase compares codes and licenses of open source and third-party software components during the software development process.

"The acquisition of Ohloh demonstrates once more the growing
value of data," said Stephen O'Grady, industry analyst with RedMonk, in
a statement. "With Ohloh's database, Black Duck can ease the friction
of commercial adoption of open-source technologies by commercial
organizations and provide developers with more and better intelligence
about open-source project health. This is a win for the company and
communities alike."

Black Duck will immediately invest in the current Ohloh Website and
community. The company expects that enhancements to the site will begin
rolling out within a few months, and will engage directly with the
Ohloh community to define and implement these enhancements. Meanwhile,
Ohloh.net already provides valuable free and unique data on FOSS
trends. The company charts such things as the number of monthly commits
made by source code developers, sorted by language.

"Koders.com and the Black Duck KnowledgeBase are tremendous and
unique productivity tools, but individual developers have been asking
for more freely available open-source content in one comprehensive
resource," said Tim Yeaton, CEO and president of Black Duck, in a
statement. "With this acquisition we'll provide the FOSS ecosystem and
all developers using open source with a complete, trusted source of
FOSS knowledge and insight, along with community and collaboration
tools to engage with peers. Black Duck enterprise customers will
benefit from Ohloh's integration with the Black Duck Suite, making open
source much easier to consume and manage in their enterprises and
making their developers that much more productive."

"Ohloh is the largest public source of data about open-source
software, and we know this data is valuable to the open-source
community," said Scott Collison, chief product officer of Geeknet and
an Ohloh founder. "SourceForge is in the forge business and not in the
business of providing data on open-source software use. We decided to
sell Ohloh to the pre-eminent FOSS data company in the world, Black
Duck Software. We've had a relationship with Black Duck for years, and
we are confident Black Duck will be the best steward of Ohloh's data
and community."

Black Duck will maintain its long standing partnership with
SourceForge, through which Black Duck gathers information about
open-source projects hosted on SourceForge. That information is made
freely available through the Koders.com code search engine and also is
incorporated into the Black Duck KnowledgeBase.

"The developers Black Duck works with have asked for more freely
available open-source content," Black Duck's Yeaton added, also in a
statement. "The acquisition of Ohloh.net, when combined with our
Koders.com free code search site and augmented with unique, additional
content from the Black Duck KnowledgeBase of open-source project
information, will enable us to provide all developers who use
open-source code with a free, trusted and comprehensive source of FOSS
information, as well as the community and collaboration tools needed to
keep them engaged and productive."